Alibaba unveils RISC-V XuanTie processors

Alibaba unveils RISC-V XuanTie processors

Alibaba, one of the largest Chinese IT companies, announced the discovery of developments related to XuanTie E902, E906, C906 and C910 processor cores, based on the 64-bit architecture of the RISC-V instruction set. The open XuanTie kernels will develop under the new names OpenE902, OpenE906, OpenC906, and OpenC910.

Diagrams, descriptions of hardware blocks in Verilog language, simulator and accompanying project documentation are published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Separately published adapted to work with chips XuanTie versions of compilers GCC and the LLVM , library Glibc to , tools of Binutils , loader the U-the Boot , the Linux kernel , middleware interface OpenSBI (RISC machines-the V the Supervisor Binary Interface), a platform for the creation of embedded Linux-based systems Yocto Project , and See also patches for launching the Android platform.

The XuanTie C910, the most powerful open chip, is manufactured by the T-Head division using a 12 nm process technology in a 16-core version, clocked at 2.5 GHz. The performance of the chip in the Coremark test reaches 7.1 Coremark / MHz , which outperforms the ARM Cortex-A73 processors. In total, Alibaba has developed 11 different RISC-V chips, of which more than 2.5 billion copies have already been released, and the company is working to establish an ecosystem to further advance the RISC-V architecture not only for IoT devices, but also for other types of computing systems.

Recall that RISC-V provides an open and flexible machine instruction system that allows you to create microprocessors for arbitrary applications without requiring royalties or imposing conditions on use. RISC-V allows you to create completely open SoCs and processors. Currently, based on the RISC-V specification, various companies and communities under various free licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0) are developing several dozen variants of microprocessor cores, SoCs and already manufactured chips. Operating systems with high-quality RISC-V support include GNU / Linux (present since Glibc 2.27, binutils 2.30, gcc 7 and Linux 4.15 kernel), FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

In addition to RISC-V, Alibaba also develops systems based on the ARM64 architecture. For example, simultaneously with the discovery of XuanTie technologies, a new server SoC Yitian 710 is presented, containing 128 ARMv9 cores of its own design, operating at a frequency of 3.2 GHz. The chip is equipped with 8 DDR5 memory channels and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes. The chip was manufactured using a 5 nm process technology, which made it possible to integrate about 60 billion transistors on a 628 mm² substrate. In terms of performance, the Yitian 710 outperforms the fastest ARM chips by about 20%, and in terms of power consumption it is more efficient by about 50%.

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